This document relates to information management.
The Internet enables access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, and news articles. Such access to these content items has likewise enabled opportunities for targeted advertising. For example, content items of particular interest to a user can be identified by a search engine in response to a user query. The query can include one or more search terms, and the search engine can identify and, optionally, rank the content items based on the search terms in the query and present the content items to the user (e.g., according to the rank). This query can also be an indicator of the type of information of interest to the user. By comparing the user query to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser, it is possible to provide targeted advertisements to the user.
Another form of online advertising is advertisement syndication, which allows advertisers to extend their marketing reach by distributing advertisements to additional partners. For example, third party online publishers can place an advertiser's text or image advertisements on web pages that have content related to the advertisement. As the users are likely interested in the particular content on the publisher webpage, they are also likely to be interested in the product or service featured in the advertisement. Accordingly, such targeted advertisement placement can help drive online customers to the advertiser's website.
Often an advertiser designs an advertising campaign that includes multiple advertisements that share an idea or theme for a product or service. Such a campaign may be designed with one or more goals, and these goals can be either quantitative or qualitative. An example quantitative goal can be increasing sales of the product or service. A qualitative campaign goal, however, can be a goal that is not directly tied to a quantifiable return on investment. Example qualitative campaign goals can be increasing brand awareness for a target demographic and increasing brand likeability.
Running such campaigns incurs a cost, and that cost is typically budgeted for the life of the campaign. In some online advertising systems, for example, advertisers pay for their advertisements in a campaign on a per-action basis, e.g., a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. The CPC of an identified advertisement can be multiplied by a performance metric, e.g., a click-through rate (CTR), for the advertisement in an auction process. This multiplied value is thus proportional to the cost of advertisement presentation. Generally, the better the advertisement performs, the better the expected return on investment (ROI) for the advertiser.
While the per-action cost model works well for a campaign that has quantitative goals and/or has quantitative budget parameters, e.g., $10,000/day of advertising spending, this same cost model may not accurately model the cost for achieving a qualitative goal. For example, a campaign may be designed to increase brand awareness. The campaign may include advertisement that are not intended to elicit clicks, but are instead intended to imprint the brand or product in the minds of the viewers. In such a campaign, the viewers' interaction with the advertisement, e.g., a click through, may not correlate to an incremental achievement of the qualitative goal. It may therefore be difficult to measure whether the qualitative goal of a campaign is being achieved in proportion to the cost incurred by a per-action cost model.